Either photo is a perfectly suitable exemplar. They were taken less than 100 miles apart, one at a breeding center, the other in a reserve. Since nobody has identified either photo to subspecies level, the identifiability issue is not very compelling, but even if both remain identified to species only, both still have value. One shows habitat well, the other shows features well. Neither shows dentition, the first thing an evolutionary researcher may wish to see, so I am grateful we also have the nice annotated dentition image. Regardless of which is the exemplar, it is most useful to have a variety of images on the overview tab, providing complementary information.

But since it IS currently still a single species, then for the present all these photos are satisfactory to identify that single species, are they not? It's true that taxonomy is not static, especially these days, but it would still seem simpler to OK photos based on the *current* status of the taxon rather than trying to guess what the *future* status might end up being. But, perhaps more importantly, as scientifically valuable as that other camera trap photo may be, the fact remains that it's a low-quality image, with the animal itself somewhat blurry. It's hardly a "five-star" image, which is what an exemplar photo is ideally supposed to be per the curation guidelines. I still respectfully submit that a high-quality image that happens to be from a zoo should trump a low-quality image that happens to be from the wild, within this narrow context of an exemplar image on what is an open-access, web-based public resource (as opposed to a strictly professional scientific database).

Sorry, I have to disagree there. First, the animal is not in its natural surrounds, it is in a habitat it wouldn't be seen dead in, let alone alive. Second, and more important, it is of unknown provenance. Ailurus is currently treated as a single species with two allopatric subspecies; should future research conclude that it should be divided into two (or more) taxa at species rank (a very possible scenario, that has occurred with numerous other species recently), then these zoo images become (because of their unknown provenance) untrustable, unidentifiable Ailurus species: in effect, worthless. A wild specimen with location is however identifiable by its location, and therefore, valuable.